164 - Love can leap across death

I jolted up out of it, laughing. “Oh, that’s too rich! No wonder my knowing mind has such a perverse sense of humour; my deeper mind does.” Yet the wrench back into Surya’s healing room was more disorienting than coming back into my body after soul-travelling. I’d sat up without noticing.

“Why do you say that?” he said. “Where were you?”

Just the act of explaining made me laugh more. “It’s a joke, Surya. There was a time, just before I became semanakraseye, after Jinai did the reading”—it was so easy to talk about these things now everyone knew—“when I went to my mother for comfort, and I told her how much I wished I was a shepherd up on Hetharin, because then I wouldn’t have this responsibility.”

“Mm-hmm,” he said. “One thing you don’t know about how to think with past lives in mind as a possibility: there are two possible interpretations of everything. You may look at it in one direction, or the opposite. You are thinking this is not a real memory but a prank of your deeper mind, because you remember wishing something similar. But it might be that when you wished it, you were actually harking back to something that was already familiar to you.”

I stared at him, stunned. “It… it can work that way?”

“Of course. You know the mind is naturally drawn to that which is familiar. What we have seen many times before is easier to see, and so we more readily see it. Somewhere within, you have a memory of a life that was simpler and relatively carefree, and in that same place is the memory of watching sheep on Hetharin. Your yearning to be free of cares drew that life, which you know was free of cares, closer to your knowing mind, and drew the slope of Hetharin and the sheep along with it.”

I sat there on his table, frozen, trying to grasp this. He was speaking of it with such certainty that it seemed hard to doubt that I had indeed once been a shepherd on Hetharin. With that certainty, a space in me seemed to open up that never had before. I sat, and he stood, in silence for a little; then he said, “You want to try again?” just as I was beginning to lie down for exactly that purpose.

I breathed deep and made the white line, and he talked me down the cavern stairs again. Blue sky… fluffy clouds… I lie with a stalk of grass between my teeth and watch the eagles. Whose is this voice asking me to look down at myself and describe what I see? It’s just the usual, my marya, my breasts, my tan kilt, my bare feet that I can walk over ice on and not notice, crossed as I lie here in the grass, my arms that I wish were as strong as my brother’s. All-Spirit, am I bored. Of course it’s a Vae Arahi marya, I tell him, this is Vae Arahi. What a thing it must be, to be semanakraseye… which semanakraseye? Who doesn’t know that? Sixth Artira. How I’d love that, to work for the whole people, Sixth Artira who? Shae-Arano-e, of course. What must it be like, to have that name?

“Go forward in time,” Surya said softly, “to what next is significant.” Pain! Such pain! My womb, turned to steel, trying to expel the baby now it is time, the bones inside my hips, my spine; it feels like it’s going to break. Mama, shadow-mama, neither of you told me how much this hurts! All-Spirit, how has every mother in the world stood it? Pain… such pain… I am fainting… the kyashin Haian is here, there really is something wrong, I feel I am splitting downwards, the bottom of me is being torn apart. The rafters that I’ve been looking at all this time, the carved running patterns, too cursed familiar. “Kyisha,” the Haian says gently, “I must break the head to save you; you can have another child, but there cannot be another you.” No no no no no NO NO NOOOO! I want my child! I’m crying, out my eyes and out my womanhood both, now. Gushing from both, no mostly from below, too much, fainting, I am dying, I am dying, mama I can feel it mama don’t let go of me mama Shininao is near I can hear his wings mama no no we are both dying mama mamaiyana…

Mama, it’s all right… I’m above, it doesn’t hurt any more, I am fine, don’t worry… oh mama, daddy, shadow-mama, I am sorry, I’m right here but I am away from you. Don’t feel so bad, it is all peaceful here, don’t worry, I am never far from you, I need never be. My child is here too, in my arms, I see him. My tiny Karani…

A hand I knew smoothed my hair back from my forehead, wiping my tears. The face looking down at me was familiar; it took a little time to remember that the man’s name was Surya. The sponge-lined room… I was— I looked down at myself, saw the man-warrior’s build and the scars, Arkan ‘A’ and ‘M’ branded on me. Chevenga. I’m Fourth Chevenga. Shae-Arano-e, semanakraseye. I breathed in where I was, acceptance of it. It was as if I’d been in her skin as much as in my own.

“And the child was my mother.” I needed to say that aloud, to tell it to Surya. “I… just recognized her… him. A corpse—the Haian did break his skull but I died as well anyway—but I knew it was the same person.” Tears came harder. “How can that be? That is a previous life of hers?”

“Yes. People maintain bonds across lives. Love can leap across death. It happens all the time.”

I lay staring up at him, trying to grasp how something so beautiful and so good could be real. My body rang with the echoes of birthing-pains, and I understood that what I felt when I went through nayasin chiravesai was an echo of that, linked across time to the true birth-pains I knew.

How much time? Sixth Artira, 1243…three centuries. Of course Assembly Palace had been smaller then. “That’s why I asked you,” he said. “It’s interesting to trace these things.”

“But…” I shook out my head, which made the death-in-childbed of Kyisha become more distant. “How do I know I am not imagining it all, like a storyteller?”

“Does it seem you are? What do you know in your heart?”

That it was real. I felt the wish not to answer, even as the answer came. I felt it all over my body, from head to toe. I’d had to look at myself to know I had the shape I did now.

“This means… this changes the entire way I look at everything,” I said, weakly. My mouth was dry. I wanted to get up and pace, so I did. I knew I would know myself as myself better in motion, because I would move as I do.

“Yes, it does,” he said. “That is part of how I have become who I am now.” He had remembered many lives, and thus, many deaths. And yet death was nothing, no harder than leaving my body when I’d been flogged; it brought only relief, and bliss. “I didn’t think I was afraid of it, and now I’m thinking how needless it was to be so afraid of it,” I said.

“Well, remembering death tends to alleviate the fear of not knowing what lies beyond,” he said. “But the body clings to life—its whole purpose is to cling to life—and so it is constituted so as to experience anything that takes life away from it as the worst suffering. That, we are naturally afraid of, and remembering death doesn’t eliminate it.”

I paced, trying to get a full grip on all this in my mind. Everything he said had the ring of truth, and yet was beyond my thorough understanding. It would just take time, I felt. Part of it was a brightness too great to bear seeing; that, I’d just have to get used to. I have to tell mama; of course, knowing her, she already knows. Surya waited patiently; then on one turn towards him I saw him gazing at my aura, with a touch of indecision on his face, until he settled it by deciding to ask me. “Enough for today?”

I froze mid-step. I felt plenty of fear; but there was an itch, too. I’d found depths and openings in me I’d had no idea existed before today. There was more of it, I knew. I lay on the table again. “In for a copper chain, in for a silver,” I said. Closing my eyes felt like leaping off a cliff.

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